pretty sure it's spring and James Elkins is on my mind

First: small yellow birds have returned to Ithaca! 


Second: I watched larger black birds with red accents on their wings pick up pieces of debris for their nests, was surprised by how much weight they could bear. 


Third: I'm getting ready to make some herbal tinctures while I research a possibly new and exciting career path!


Now for the blog post:


James Elkins' Stories of Art is one of those reads that I read again and again. Lately, I've been reading it with nostalgia: I miss teaching art. I left teaching art and writing for a number of reasons and career transitioning is up and down at best. One of the primary reasons I left was because I wanted to focus on my own craft and craft making--sadly, leaving has shown me that teaching art actually gave me more time, more reason for making. Learning to be an independent maker is harder. Academia is comfortable, it enables the process. 


In trying to figure out my own process--and not just in art, but in being a wife, a daughter, a sister, a person--I've gone back again to Elkins' work. If you haven't read chapter one, where the discussion of mapping art history is contained, do yourself a favor and mosey over to this SAIC site that has the whole chapter ready for your reading. 


I'm working on a map of my own process for Mary Ayling from Fill in the Blank Gallery, but I'm thinking that this is going to be a series, a three month series dedicated to weekly map making. Right now, I'm doing this on regular sketch paper because I like the idea of a graphite series after seeing some gorgeous post-it note sketches at the Gimme! Mott Street store. Kristen Leonard's sketches were awesome, careful, and totally bizarre. I've always loved the way graphite can look like lino or even like etching, and I have a major appreciation for the kind of patience it takes to not smear the pencil, to make the lines exacting, to make each line in general. 


Here's a rough draft of the first map--where I'm mostly trying to think about how duality and time are part of my poetic process:

I need to work out the arrows and the writing/font, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming together as a map. When I think about the poetic process, it's less messy than my visual arts process. Probably because I'm "trained" in poetry and I just try my hand at other arts. I want, badly, to start realizing more about the visual work in my literary pursuits. I always considered poetry visual and just want to really push into that part of language--as object, as something "seen"--but it's sonic capacity seems valuable, it's cerebral too. How to approach the multi dimensionality of language? I'll probably separate the maps, compartmentalize them a bit, to see if I can tackle one question at a time.